In the years when I performed the Hajj, then wrote a book about it, between 1990 and 1993, I became aware of a string of accounts by Muslims and non-Muslims who over the last one thousand years had gone to Mecca on the pilgrimage. A little later, I began to read these works in order. I had no trouble locating the first three authors excerpted in this collection. Naser-e Khosraw (in Mecca in 1050), Ibn Jubayr (1185), and Ibn Battuta (1326) are all classics. Other books, deservedly well-known, by Western authors like Sir Richard Burton (1853) and Malcolm X (1964), are readily available in bookstores. Bibliographical searches and the polling of scholars uncovered many more works I did not know. Some were rare volumes, ordered and shipped from libraries across the country. Tracking them down, even handling them—at times in first editions that threatened to crumble in one’s hands—was an adventure. But that was not the end of my reading. The job of placing each book in its context led to other books, of history, of Muslim theology, of Western literary criticism.
I began this work for the pleasure of it. I continued in the growing belief that it brings together a literature worth collecting. Certainly practicing Muslims will find plenty here to interest them. Others may find these stories entertaining as adventures. As cultural artifacts, they may have importance, too, especially for Westerners in this period of deep misunderstandings about Islam. Islam is a majority faith in fifty-four countries around the globe, most of them in the Middle East, the East, and Africa. In addition, millions of Muslims now live in Western countries, Western cities, Western neighborhoods. It is no secret that in these latter settings, Muslim–non-Muslim relationships suffer from misconceptions on all sides. If Westerners have more pressing reasons now to learn about Islam, perhaps the Hajj can provide a way to that knowledge. After all, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca is a supreme expression of the Muslim religion. All the principal practices of the faith are contained and made more apparent in its rites. Furthermore, the records of this journey that pilgrims have been making now for thirteen centuries reveal Islamic civilization as a vital global society with many centers and with a stronger religious aspect than many Westerners imagine. Performing the Hajj is not a case of the hollow fulfillment of an empty rite. These accounts are proof, if that were needed, of its persistent and attractive force for every kind of Muslim. The Hajj has drawn people across thousands of miles, in huge numbers, through every sort of calamity. It continues to do so. It has not died out with modernity. It has flourished.
The Hajj and the writing that surrounds it, then, may offer non-Muslim readers a fresh way of envisioning Islam, particularly when so many of its best written records are by Western authors. Two thirds of the accounts collected here are by Europeans and Americans. Together, they help make palpable the breadth and cultural richness of Islamic civilization, framed in Western languages and thought. Some of these books were popular in their day; some have remained so. Burton’s work on Mecca and Medina is one of the finest travel books in nineteenth-century English; Malcolm X’s Hajj account appears in a twentieth-century bestseller. How is it, one wonders, that non-Muslims know these books yet have no clear conception of Islam or the pilgrimage to Mecca? I began to hope this collection might even prove instructive, both for non-Muslim area experts who may be familiar with Islam but not with the Hajj and for that majority of the Western reading public who admit they know almost nothing about either.
This book is a literary anthology containing works by travelers who performed the Hajj and wrote at least passingly well about it. It proceeds chronologically from the mid-eleventh century into the first decade of the twenty-first, when the last two books excerpted here were composed. I have chosen the accounts for their variety, in order to give readers a sense of the changing aspects of the Hajj over the centuries as well as a feel for how perennial the rites themselves have proved. Secondhand accounts and the flood of ephemeral works by returning hajjis who wrote to memorialize a journey for friends or family have been omitted. I wanted primary documents that were more carefully observed than sentimental. Unfortunately, no accounts by Turkish authors appear here, although the Ottoman court in Istanbul oversaw Hajj travel for five centuries. My only excuse is a lack of suitable translations. A similar problem occurred with the narratives of Southeast Asia, for although the region supplies a huge number of pilgrims to this day, the only full-length account in English of such a journey is a third-person retelling by the journalist Owen Rutter of David Chale’s 1937 journey. The 1848 Pilgrimage of Ahmad and Léon Roches’s Dix ans à travers d’Islam, 1834–1844 are both wonderful books, but I have had to omit them. The collection is selective, not exhaustive.
The three accounts translated from Persian retain spellings found in English editions of these works. With Arabic, approximations in English have varied widely over the centuries. For example, I have counted half a dozen different spellings of the central term Tawaf in the originals of these accounts. Spellings of names and places can be equally confusing. Is the goal of the pilgrim Mecca, Makkah, Macca, or Mek? Was the famous twelfth-century ruler of Egypt Saladin (a Western preference) or Salah al-Din (his real name)? With exceptions that would cloud their recognition were spellings altered, I have standardized the orthography throughout this collection. Most diacritical marks have been omitted. Footnotes to the editions, whether by an author or later editors, have been omitted, too, except where they assist the nonacademic reader. Footnotes by the present editor are marked with the abbreviation “Ed.”
These twenty-five accounts are arranged into five historical periods and supplied with brief introductory essays. The dates below the essay titles indicate the year when the authors performed the pilgrimage. A longer General Introduction follows this Preface and sets the pilgrimage in a broader context. Occasionally, the excerpted selections have been edited or cut here to make the text more readable. Readers seeking fuller historical treatment of the Hajj and Mecca, based on primary sources, may turn to F. E. Peters’s 1994 volumes. This book, on the other hand, is the story of a journey— from home, wherever home might be, to Mecca, as recorded by travelers over a thousand years.
The tale of the Hajj is not always a simple one. Its administration through the years has been in the hands and sometimes at the mercy of many a facile potentate, and the cynicism with which it has been manipulated as a symbol can be shocking. In another vein, the Hajj has drawn every kind of traveler to it, making a collection such as this a complex medley of cultures and personalities. Poets, bureaucrats, spies, ne’er-do-wells, queens, slaves, the fabulously wealthy, old and young, lawyers, judges, confidence men, scholars, novelists, existentialists, and devout believers all are represented in these pages. So, too, are Persians, Moroccans, Afghans, Meccans, Spaniards, Australians, Hindi Indians, Austrians, Italians, Swiss, Americans, and Britons, just to mention the authors represented in this volume. Each excerpt adds its part to a larger story. In order to appreciate these travelers more, we have to comprehend something of their times. I say something by way of reservation because the necessary brevity of my introductions limits their scope severely. The books listed in the Bibliography are intended as a first layer of recommended reading.
—M. W.